Help us add to our library by using the comment thread to suggest quality reading on entitlement spending. Keep in mind that you are looking for sources that people who don’t believe entitlement spending is a future risk might find convincing in moving them toward seeing the asteroid. Be sure to also assess the credibility of your source through the lens of someone less likely to agree with you (to convince a liberal, you might want to avoid citing Ann Coulter or Fox News). Emotional and intuitive arguments can be very effective, but evaluate them critically first – anything that demonizes or belittles those who resist the notion that entitlement spending has to be reformed will only serve to cement their resistance.

Interesting talk on the American public’s views on how the deficit should be reduced. What’s somewhat surprising is just how much of the federal budget has strong Republican support — it isn’t just liberals who will be defending entitlement spending from cuts. Not that surprising in retrospect considering that conservatives tend to be older Americans who are on or soon will be on Social Security and Medicare.

I propose that entitlement spending is the effect of a deeper cause. The deeper cause is the mentality behind notions such as “social justice” and “positive liberty” which are characteristic of the three-foundation morality of liberalism, which emphasizes the moral foundation of “care” above all others.

Jonathan Haidt described the concept of positive liberty in his lecture “When Compassion Leads to Sacrilege” which he gave at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University.
Video available here: http://vimeo.com/24606251

Here’s a quote from the lecture: “The trick here is to understand that there are two kinds of liberty at play in our political discourse. There’s negative liberty which is the absence of obstacles which block human action. This is the common sense understanding of liberty. And then there’s a new notion that developed in the twentieth century, especially in Europe called positive liberty, which is, well, it’s all well and good to say that people should have a right to do as the please but if you can’t get an education then you don’t really have a right to do as you please. And if you can’t get health care, well, you’re not healthy enough to take advantage of the opportunities of our society. Sooo, we have to give people, as rights, education, welfare, food, a right to a job, all these rights that they enshrine in Europe. And that is known as positive liberty. It’s really crucial to recognize that the top one [negative liberty] is deep, emotional, obvious, everyone gets it, the bottom one [positive liberty] is a cerebral concept developed by philosophers gradually, has very little emotional resonance. You probably understood my description but it doesn’t rankle. Violations of it don’t rankle in the way that violations of negative liberty do.”

Here’s a quote from the book: “Central to the concept of social justice is the notion that individuals are entitled to some share of the wealth produced by society, simply by virtue of being members of that society, and irrespective of any individual contributions made or not made to the production of that wealth.”

A quote from Oakley: “I have come to believe,” she explains, “that, for my fellow liberals, empathy, altruism and caring for others have become a kind of secular religion that is actually harmful, because it can be used as a cover for nefarious, corrupt and self-serving action. People can be blinded by their caring into doing things that hurt those they hope to help. Like communism, altruism is often seemingly beneficent”http://www.barbaraoakley.com/files/Oakley_Times_Higher_Education_Supplement.pdf

Thanks, we’re using a number of these resources on our main resource page on entitlements. It’ll be up shortly. Appreciate the assist. We probably won’t look at the deeper causes/philosophical underpinning because our goal is to get people to agree on the factual nature of the asteroid coming toward us – that’s a big enough lift in the current political environment. Anyone having been told that broadly their philosophy is flawed becomes more defensive and less likely to listen.